All 50 Uses of
sublime
in
Les Miserables
- He would have feared those sublimities whence some very great men even, like Swedenborg and Pascal, have slipped into insanity.†
Chpt 1.1 *
- Since the most sublime things are often those which are the least understood, there were people in the town who said, when commenting on this conduct of the Bishop, "It is affectation."†
Chpt 1.1
- Incomplete, it may be, but sublime.†
Chpt 1.1
- Let there be no mistake as to our meaning: we are not confounding what is called "political opinions" with the grand aspiration for progress, with the sublime faith, patriotic, democratic, humane, which in our day should be the very foundation of every generous intellect.†
Chpt 1.1
- Puerile they may be; but these sublime puerilities were peculiar to Saint Francis d'Assisi and of Marcus Aurelius.†
Chpt 1.1
- That slumber in that isolation, and with a neighbor like himself, had about it something sublime, of which he was vaguely but imperiously conscious.†
Chpt 1.2
- Saint-Simon, ignored, was erecting his sublime dream.†
Chpt 1.3
- All the most august, the most sublime, the most charming of humanity, and perhaps outside of humanity, have made puns.†
Chpt 1.3
- The man who is not loved soars like a vulture over the mistresses of other men; and for my own part, to all those unfortunate men who are widowers, I throw the sublime proclamation of Bonaparte to the army of Italy: "Soldiers, you are in need of everything; the enemy has it."†
Chpt 1.3
- Fantine acquired this sublime talent, and regained a little courage.†
Chpt 1.5
- But she smiled on him with that sublime smile in which two teeth were lacking.†
Chpt 1.6
- The peculiarity of sublime spectacles is, that they capture all souls and turn witnesses into spectators.†
Chpt 1.7
- There are some touching illusions which are, perhaps, sublime realities.†
Chpt 1.8
- Something parallel to this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient Orphic epics, which told of the centaurs, the old hippanthropes, those Titans with human heads and equestrian chests who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible, invulnerable, sublime—gods and beasts.†
Chpt 2.1
- He said in an undertone, "Sublime!"†
Chpt 2.1
- When this legion had been reduced to a handful, when nothing was left of their flag but a rag, when their guns, the bullets all gone, were no longer anything but clubs, when the heap of corpses was larger than the group of survivors, there reigned among the conquerors, around those men dying so sublimely, a sort of sacred terror, and the English artillery, taking breath, became silent.†
Chpt 2.1
- This would enjoin us from consigning something sublime to History.†
Chpt 2.1
- This is great to sublimity.†
Chpt 2.6
- There is, in the synagogue, in the mosque, in the pagoda, in the wigwam, a hideous side which we execrate, and a sublime side, which we adore.†
Chpt 2.7
- We are of the number who believe in the wretchedness of orisons, and the sublimity of prayer.†
Chpt 2.7
- Before his eyes he had the sublime summit of abnegation, the highest possible pitch of virtue; the innocence which pardons men their faults, and which expiates in their stead; servitude submitted to, torture accepted, punishment claimed by souls which have not sinned, for the sake of sparing it to souls which have fallen; the love of humanity swallowed up in the love of God, but even there preserving its distinct and mediatorial character; sweet and feeble beings possessing the misery of those who are punished and the smile of those who are recompensed.†
Chpt 2.8
- When he thought on these things, all that was within him was lost in amazement before this mystery of sublimity.†
Chpt 2.8
- it multiplies itself under all sorts of forms of the sublime;†
Chpt 3.1
- All sublime conquests are, more or less, the prizes of daring.†
Chpt 3.1
- This crowd may be rendered sublime.†
Chpt 3.1
- Marius came to a full knowledge of that rare, sweet, and sublime man, that species of lion-lamb who had been his father.†
Chpt 3.3
- Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime.†
Chpt 3.4
- To cause constellations of victories to flash forth at each instant from the zenith of the centuries, to make the French Empire a pendant to the Roman Empire, to be the great nation and to give birth to the grand army, to make its legions fly forth over all the earth, as a mountain sends out its eagles on all sides to conquer, to dominate, to strike with lightning, to be in Europe a sort of nation gilded through glory, to sound athwart the centuries a trumpet-blast of Titans, to conquer the world twice, by conquest and by dazzling, that is sublime; and what greater thing is there?†
Chpt 3.4
- Admirable and terrible trial from which the feeble emerge base, from which the strong emerge sublime.†
Chpt 3.5
- A grave situation being given, he had all that is required to be stupid: one more turn of the key, and he might be sublime.†
Chpt 3.6
- Its blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness of the inkstand.†
Chpt 3.7
- The soul which loves and suffers is in a state of sublimity.†
Chpt 4.2
- Jean Valjean had instituted an undeclared war against Marius, which Marius, with the sublime stupidity of his passion and his age, did not divine.†
Chpt 4.3
- The man who makes his escape, we repeat, is inspired; there is something of the star and of the lightning in the mysterious gleam of flight; the effort towards deliverance is no less surprising than the flight towards the sublime, and one says of the escaped thief: "How did he contrive to scale that wall?" in the same way that one says of Corneille: "Where did he find the means of dying?"†
Chpt 4.6
- Since '89, the whole people has been dilating into a sublime individual; there is not a poor man, who, possessing his right, has not his ray of sun; the die-of-hunger feels within him the honesty of France; the dignity of the citizen is an internal armor; he who is free is scrupulous; he who votes reigns.†
Chpt 4.7
- yes, childish prattle, repetitions, laughter at nothing, nonsense, everything that is deepest and most sublime in the world!†
Chpt 4.8
- She is there with her brutal and sublime object; and however great may be the innocence of souls, one feels in the most modest private interview, the adorable and mysterious shade which separates a couple of lovers from a pair of friends.†
Chpt 4.8
- So these two beings lived in this manner, high aloft, with all that improbability which is in nature; neither at the nadir nor at the zenith, between man and seraphim, above the mire, below the ether, in the clouds; hardly flesh and blood, soul and ecstasy from head to foot; already too sublime to walk the earth, still too heavily charged with humanity to disappear in the blue, suspended like atoms which are waiting to be precipitated; apparently beyond the bounds of destiny; ignorant of that rut; yesterday, to-day, to-morrow; amazed, rapturous, floating, soaring; at times so light that they could take their flight out into the infinite; almost prepared to soar away to all eternity.†
Chpt 4.8
- Suicides like that which is on the brink of accomplishment here are sublime; but suicide is narrow, and does not admit of extension; and as soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide is murder.†
Chpt 5.1
- Strange contradictions of the human heart at its most sublime moments.†
Chpt 5.1
- France bears this sublime future in her breast.†
Chpt 5.1
- The finite which admits of progress and sublime toil, they do not think about.†
Chpt 5.1
- The one is magnificent, the other sublime.†
Chpt 5.1
- In the matter of civilization, he must not refine, but he must sublime.†
Chpt 5.1
- France has her relapses into materialism, and, at certain instants, the ideas which obstruct that sublime brain have no longer anything which recalls French greatness and are of the dimensions of a Missouri or a South Carolina.†
Chpt 5.1
- For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people; where there is everything there is also ignominy by the side of sublimity; and, if Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city of might, Sparta, the city of virtue, Nineveh, the city of marvels, it also contains Lutetia, the city of mud.†
Chpt 5.2
- In vain did he struggle, he was reduced to confess, in his inmost heart, the sublimity of that wretch.†
Chpt 5.4
- Javert's ideal, was not to be human, to be grand, to be sublime; it was to be irreproachable.†
Chpt 5.4
- He exclaimed, with a vivacity which had something of wrath in it: "Yes, that man, whoever he may have been, was sublime.†
Chpt 5.5
- Paris is a great, mad city on every occasion that it is a great sublime city.†
Chpt 5.6
Definitions:
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(1)
(sublime as in: she is sublime) impressively wonderful -- often beautiful or morally admirable
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(2)
(sublime as in: sublime ignorance) pure or extreme
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(3)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
More rarely, in chemistry or physics, sublime is used to indicate that something changes from a solid into a vapor without first melting; or vaporizes and then condenses right back again. That sense of the word is also often seen in the form sublimate.